:soypoint-1::stalin-gun-1:🏝️
A lot of people seem to believe the Sentinelese are pissed off for no reason. The British did expeditions there in the 1800s and killed a bunch of elderly people and kidnapped children. The Sentinelese have been justifiably cautious ever since.
There is a historical theory that when colonialism was huge, someone escaped from the terror from somewhere else and warned the North Sentinelese about it, so they've been super aggressive against any outsider ever since. And well, it worked for them. Their reputation goes WAY back.
Yeah I mean being very isolated and very defensive towards colonisers is about the only strategy that seems to work.
I guess people think of them as humanitarian workers, or at least as people that have given up material comforts to pursue a "higher purpose." A lot of missionary work, especially in the more mainline Christian denominations, is indistinguishable at first glance from secular NGOs/charities.
A lot of missionary work is indistinguishable at first glance from secular NGOs
Yes, a lot of "missionary work" is CIA shit, it's literally the same people.
CIA larvae vs CIA puppae
It's a bit of a stretch but your comment reminded me of this film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_Mr._Marshall!
savage italian catholics need to see the light of the southern anabaptist convention of 1874's holy words!
My cousin and aunt briefly floated the idea of moving to India to do God's work in a mission and were going to sell all their stuff, I asked if I could have his Xbox.
One time a bunch of Texan missionaries were sent to the part of Wales I grew up in, my impression is that the ones that are mask-off racist go to places where the population tends to be white.
Blew their minds that there are black people in Britain. Didn't get along with the locals on account of using Britain and England interchangeably.
Also, why are missionaries still respected
because liberal :brainworms: loves charity instead of fixing economic problems at their root cause. I see even secular people who "just gotta hand it to" the missionaries because their colonialist pre-occupation with proselytizing to poor people in far away lands usually comes with a few free crumbs from the imperial core
The real meaning of missionaries is Christians getting rid of their most zealous, problematic members by telling them, "go into the middle of nowhere where you will have no reach and no influence and preach the gospel, brother!"
Honestly orgs should learn from this. It's actually a brilliant move. It's always the crazies who fuck things up for everyone else, and banishing them to furthest nowhere and telling them to build a satellite org is a great way to get rid of them. If they succeed, great! If not, great too. Welcome them home after 30 years and give sympathy for how they didn't accomplish anything because the savages didn't read theory. It's win-win!
The Christians were doing this 1500 years ago. And it worked.
They got rid of their weirdos and gained a ton of satellite orgs. Too many people reflexively dismiss anything the Christians did because muh atheism. But it's actually a power move to appropriate their time-tested tactics and make them work for a positive outcome.
That's really not what it is or why they do it. It's almost always been a means of cultural infiltration either coinciding with or in advance of colonial invasion and occupation. Missionaries played an important role in enforcing colonial control over colonized people by indoctrinating them in European religious beliefs and European notions of their inferiority.
It also serves an important cultural role for the sect doing the proselytizing as it serves as a form of rite of passage for youth, and a way for the community to re-affirm and justify it's own beliefs by doing "Good works" or "Saving souls" or however they conceptualize it. Most Western missionaries in the modern day are poverty tourists with religious delusions and will return to their community after a few months or a few years at most.
It's also a great excuse to step up your imperialism game if you send some missionaries that get killed and now you just have to go and teach someone a lesson. Your hands are tied, some of our people were attacked I totally swear bro just one more punitive expedition and they'll see the light of progress
Libs can respect people who go to developing countries to bully them about their beliefs
ongoing and sanitized colonial projects are still a-ok in the west :agony-minion:
missionaries should be subjected to immediate physical assault tho; turn the other cheek motherfucker :nazi-punching:
why are missionaries still respected
Only by Christians, and then only within the same sect. Well, and I guess Muslims have a lot of respect for Muslim missionaries. I'm not sure what other religions proselytize other than some cults.
"Don't you think it's weird that anti-aircraft guns with clearly labelled pictographic instructions keep washing up on the shore?"
very well deserved, best not to contact them at all for any purpose (ok maybe if the island goes underwater) considering how many diseases we carry.
That's the Christian go-to to justify evangelizing tribes. Been done for 500 years now to great effect - complete destruction of said peoples and cultures!
Talk to a christian about how colonialism and capitalism took people who were indigenous and living dignified if precarious lives and then genocided them, took their land, and turned the survivors into wage slaves when they previously were able to sustain themselves.... and they will say without hesitation that it was worth it because now they know about Jesus.
living dignified if precarious lives
A lot of indigenous economies were doing just fine and provided everyone involved with ample calories and nutrition. In a very serious way the only advantages the Europeans had in much of the world prior to the industrial revolution was ironmongery and a willingness to send as many poor people as it took to subjugate, enslave, and destroy other nations.
Are cannibals actually real (you know, besides cannibalism done out of desperation or individual people such as Jeffrey Dahmer or Armin Meiwes)?
Yes, and they're white people.
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I shit you not Anglos literally ATE a lot of mummies that they pillaged
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When they first tried to conquer parts of what is now the US, they resorted to cannibalism when crops failed.
So much for the civilized, noble, master race we're all supposed to look up to.
Also, cannibalism was super common among European sailors during the colonisation of the Americas.
Also during the Crusades and just in warfare in general, because when all the crops are burned for miles and you're out of food you're not going to let that meat go to waste
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Sort of maybe in some places yes. If I recall, there's some evidence beyond the anecdotal (i.e. mistranslations or one tribe just slagging off the tribe that lives just up the river) that some cultures practised ritual cannibalism as part of funeral rites. Like a lot of anthropology though, it suffers somewhat due to a lot of the research being done by people who had a very entrenched mindest and viewpoint not conducting particulalry rigorous science.
I can't remember any details because my classes were so long ago, but I think there are like one or two cases of cultures that actually hunt and eat people deliberately, and I'm almost certain that it was tied to warfare practices and largely intended as a form of terrorism aimed at their military enemies. And again, it's so rare that there are only a few cases, even if I'm remembering this right.
Kuru is similar to mad cow disease, which is how I heard about it. Went down an internet rabbit trail when mad cow disease was in the news and the word "kuru" got burned into my brain because the word sounds cool and it describes a disease with some truly horrible symptoms. The disease was present among people groups in Papua New Guinea. Ritual cannibalism, as I recall, was a way of honoring the dead. So it wasn't some kind of vengeance or conquering thing like it's been depicted in the stereotypical "explorer with pith helmet in giant cauldron over a fire" image. It was more of a tender way to take a loved one's body into your own after death . Unfortunately, consuming the dead relative also meant that you consumed the prions, and you might develop the debilitating disease.
Mad cow disease, scrapie in sheep, and chronic wasting disease in north American deer are all prion disorders.
Mad cow disease was famously spread due to sick and dead cows being ground up and fed to healthy cows.
Prions are notoriously hard to destroy. They generally aren't rendered inert or safe by cooking or other processes so even cooked meat can spread the illness to healthy animals.
Chronic Wasting Disease is causing serious problems in the north American deer population as deer shed infectious prions as they feed, rest, or where they die. These prions are extremely hardy and can persist in then environment for months or years. Since natural predators are wiped out across most of the deer's range, and hunting practices are far from sufficient to cull the herd size, the disease is essentially spreading uncontrolled due to high population density bringing infected deer in contact with uninfected deer. The solution, of course, is to un-fence America and restore the wolf population but try to sell that in congress.
Yeah, seriously. Prion diseases are so scary to me, and the thought of Chronic Wasting Disease spreading throughout such a numerous animal as deer is completely terrifying. Wolf reintroduction is clearly the right choice, but I don't have much hope. It's wild the number of diseases that run rampant because humans upset the balance of the ecosystem. Just a couple months ago I was randomly reading about the extinct passengers pigeons that were so numerous that they used to blot out the sky. Turns out there's a theory that the reason why Lyme disease has become so rampant is because the massive population of pigeons used to compete with rodents for the same food, so now the rodent population is much larger than it used to be, and thus Lyme disease flourishes.
Kuru is a prion disease of human brain tissue. Prions are proteins that are incorrectly folded. They cause adjacent proteins to fold incorrectly, turning them in to new prions. The disease progresses slowly but eventually causes severe cognitive problems and death.
Kuru is endemic to the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. They have a funerary practice of eating the bodies of deceased community members. The practice has important religious and spiritual significance to them. Unfortunately, at some point in the past a member of the Fore spontaneously developed this prion disorder and their practice of funerary cannibalism provided a vector for it to spread in the community and become endemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fore_people#Kuru_among_the_South_Fore
It's really very tragic. The very practice that people used to honor their deceased loved ones and protect the community from spiritual dangers turned out to be the vector for a deadly disease that almost wiped them out.
Edit: Apparently there are scholars that argue that dismemberment of the body was practiced during funerary rights, but cannibalism was not, and that the spread of Kuru might have occurred during a specific period of famine when cannibalism was practiced out of desperation.
God that fucking dork talking about crusading them is something else. Going on a crusade would imply leaving your basement. Why don't you go crusading for some pussy instead? Lord knows you need it. :lenin-sure:
further down in the comments
"Also, iirc the guy pictured didn't immediately die. His diary showed that he got got for being a habitual line stepper"
lol, lmao
lol what a complete piece of shit; probably thought he could just bulldoze his way into their community and convert them just like that
Idk I like the idea that the missionary went to the island and went "Actually this way of living owns fuck jesus I'll stay here hand me a fuckin' bow"
virgin christian missionary vs. chad indigenous conversion without even trying
This has happened a lot historically all over the world. Turns out that being a disposable foot soldier for an evil expansionist empire isn't a great way to live and a lot of them took the chance to defect to indigenous societies when they could.
